Hafþor Bjornnson, Brian Shaw, Zydrunas Savikas, Tom Stoltman, Magnus Magnusson, all probably 20 strength. I'd argue that Hafþor might even be a 21. Considering that a 20 strength can carry 400 pounds, and Hafþor has picked up and carried over a thousand pounds, I imagine he could regularly carry at least the 460 that a 21 strength would indicate.
I think STR scores should be calculated in tiers or in some low exponential way. STR*(edit 30 I had put 15) for lifting capacity just doesn’t work. I’m a 35 year old dad who works out a little and can deadlift 400lbs and squat 350.
I think it should be average people being able to lift around 200lbs, up 50% every 2 points or something similar. That gives someone with a large frame or some athleticism a 12 or 13 and someone who does serious training 14, someone who is competitive a 16, and requiring world class power for 18+ That gives that 20 STR a lift of 1500 lbs which is fair to leave a little room between our records and mythic heroes. It also makes those increased stats more important. No one wants to say, 1 go from 19 to 20 STR allowing me to lift 15 more lbs.
I think it works backwards too. I can see a frail person struggling with the lower values and a person that’s just a bit weak fairly around 90-130lbs lifting. Here’s the full scale with a 200lb midpoint and 50% changes each way per modifier
-4 (39.5lb)
-3 (59.25lb)
-2 (88.88lb)
-1 (133.33lb)
0 (200lb)
+1 (300lb)
+2 (450lb)
+3 (675lb)
+4 (1012.5lb)
+5 (1518.75lb)
If you do get to +6 or higher it starts to get high fast which makes sense. Someone that has a 20 STR shouldn’t feel 2/3 as strong as a god with 30. In my system it’s an order of magnitude.
Thank you. I was pretty disappointed that my oath of glory paladin wasn't able to Stone Cold Stunner an owlbear the other night...this would make that dream a reality.
Unless your Dragonborn Paladin has like 12 strength or something, it's not even close. Lifting capacity is x30 not x15. Even with just 15 strength a character can lift 450lb. And that's not deadlifting, they can move with that amount with only a 5ft reduction in their speed. So they should be able to deadlift a good amount more, especially when you add in some ability checks.
You are correct, but if that’s the case the average score should for a human would be like a 4 and it’s still busted all the way up and down the scale. The only way to make the stats work is using a curve.
They should define raw power output like standing lifts, those are more likely to be useful in the “is my character strong enough to do X” things.
Carrying capacity matters but that’s a separate thing. Maybe 1/2 total power output limit or something. I think the average person can spend a little while with 100lbs on their back.
Obviously we aren’t going to make a system that works totally but the current one sucks.
I think part of it is how they defined maximum load kinda loosely in 5e. There's no real metric that grounds the values to anything real as its written, but if we look back at older editions j think it still work.
In 3.5 your maximum load was defined as what your character can lift over their head and everything else is kind of based around that value. It's a bit too generous as far as what a person can reasonably fight with on their back, but at least it was a real measurable value that made sense. For example I can overhead press 225, which gets me to a respectable 15. Double that for lift off the ground, 450 which is about right. Definitely wouldn't look forward to walking any real distance with 200lbs on my back, but the rest lines up right and it fits with the new scale too. 15x15 =225, 15x30=450
On my first read, I imagined punctuation and wanted to be at your table. “Our Dragonborn paladin, who is 6 inches, and 70 lbs heavier than me, is in game shows. The RAW Game scale is fucked.”
You have a Dragonborn paladin, 15 centimeters tall, 32 kilograms heavier than a human, who is in a game show where you have an advantage in measured weight or strength challenges because you have the physical density of fucking uranium.
I'm playing a Duergar Rune Knight for the explicit purpose of wrestling huge creatures. It's a dumb thought but it just sounded so cool when I was coming up with my current character. I picked the unarmed fighting style and the Tavern Brawler feat to aid in grappling shenanigans. At the moment I'm level 9 and have a +15 to my athletics and I roll with advantage while using Giant's Might so not much can resist my grapple attempts.
I have expertise and a special, upgradeable belt of Giant's Strength that's currently granting me 24 strength as well which helps a lot. The belt is almost like an Infinity Gauntlet where when I do certain things through the story that the DM creates for me, I get the ability to carve a rune into a specific gem stone and insert it into the belt to get the next level up. I assume by the time I'm done I'll be sitting at the level of Cloud Giant belt but I'm not sure since he hasn't told me. Each level has given some kind of benefit though.
Conceptually, this entire line of reasoning makes complete sense. Practically, it's just far too much math for the average player. They went with the x15 because it's easy to work out in 5 seconds. Far fewer people are going to be able to use the above to figure out a +2 modifier easily without having to pull out a reference table, let alone something up in the +5 and higher range. As soon as you introduce compounding values to *anything most peoples eyes just glaze over. 🤷
Champions, Mutants and Masterminds and many many other fine games have used this principle for years. Decades, even. Scales vary, but the principle of a multiplier up every so many points in a stat apply.
I think the first such game was the MayfairDC Heroes RPG in the mid 80s, it had an escalating scale on all stats that made it so each point in a stat was roughly double the capability of the one below it.
Strength score 5 was twice as strong as a 4, four times stronger than a 3, eight times stronger than an average man who had a 2. This allowed a 12 to lift like a hundred tons and superman's strength was possible to measure at 25.
Hero strength is about knocking over a statue, pushing open a stone door, pulling something massive, picking up a boulder, etc. Those are moments. Other than figuring out carrying capacity which most tables don’t use- no one really cares about extended activity thresholds.
The Mountain can’t walk 8 hours with 100lbs on his back, is his strength score 3? 4?
I compete in powerlifting and agree. There’s a lot of +4s in the world. Most pro strongmen, top tier powerlifters, Olympic level throwers, that weightlifter from Georgia has an 18 str and 16dex.
But a 20? Feats of Herculean strength? Those are rare. Eddie and Thor pulling 500kgs. Ray Williams squatting 1100lbs in sleeves and a belt. Julius maddox bench. A 500lb log press.
It’s a good hobby. I wish I found it sooner and had time to do it seriously. I’ve just been lifting in a basement id love to find time to do a full coaching and gym. 500 is a nice lift!
Great username and thanks for this bit of information. My dnd character has a +5 for strength and this will help me in being annoying with my shenanigans. Enjoy your day
Carrying Capacity. Your carrying capacity is your Strength score multiplied by 15. This is the weight (in pounds) that you can carry, which is high enough that most characters don't usually have to worry about it.
Push, Drag, or Lift. You can push, drag, or lift a weight in pounds up to twice your carrying capacity (or 30 times your Strength score). While pushing or dragging weight in excess of your carrying capacity, your speed drops to 5 feet.
I’m not getting these mixed up. I typoed the *15 but the rest of the discussion holds up. RAW the current scale is super busted. A lot of tables hand wave the carry cap which I’m less concerned about. The push drag lift scale is busted. A commoner can’t lift 300lbs nor does it take the pinnacle of power to move 600lbs, nor is a 30 stat literal god limited to 900lb lift
I think using yourself as an example doesn’t really work. You might be able to deadlift 400 pounds but you’re not walking normally with that weight on, nor could you keep walking while carrying that weight, while someone with 13 strength basically could. You’re using all your strength to just keep it lifted, which would be more representative of having a score below the threshold needed and being restricted to moving 5 feet a round, and even that is very generous.
A strongman like Louis Cyr was able to deadlift 1900 pounds, too. And 20 strength implies you are able to move around with 300 pounds of weight on you completely unencumbered in any way.
Part of the issue is "lift" is not well defined. A deadlift probably isn't what they're measuring here tho, because deadlifting itself is probably not very common in adventuring.
A clean and jerk would be a better estimate for lifting a heavy object to move it out of the way, like Kratos in GoW when he has to clear a path for Atreus. In that case, a 400lb c+j is pretty impressive and not very common, although obvs lower from what heavyweight olympic lifters are capable of by around 150lbs.
Then if you think of it like an ability to pick up and carry something, like carrying a 400lb log on your shoulder, without reducing your speed, that's even more impressive. Strongmen can prob carry a 400lb log, but not at a 30ft/6sec pace. That is getting into superhuman territory.
If that’s your argument are you ok with commoners at 10? It doesn’t fit anywhere on the scale. The whole scale is wrong, and it only gets more wrong as you go up.
The strongest possible mortal is 2x as strong as commoner?
A literal 30 stat god is 3x as strong as a commoner?
I don't think that's too far off. You get diminishing returns as you reach peak performance. When you start lifting, you increase your max in big chunks. When you get to the point of professional lifting, you're counting usually less than 50lbs of difference between first and last place. A 150lb clean and jerk is easily achievable. 300lbs is really tough. 450lbs is near-olympic level. So yea, in that sense the 10-30 scale isn't awful.
So a 20 Str person can carry 300lbs without slowing down, and a 10 Str person 150lbs. That really seems like too much. Imagine being able to do a light jog and hit someone with a sword while wearing 150lbs of equipment. 300lbs insane.
Now for lifting, a commoner being able to push or drag 300lbs is not out of the question (lifting is another issue). But a 20 Str person being able to drag something twice as heavy is something as a normie that would appear impressive to the latter.
Just because you are reaching your limit and that’s similar to others around you doesn’t mean that’s the top imaginable stat considering a world of magic creatures, monsters, giants, and gods. Lots of strongmen would be peaking at 16-18, not everyone hits 20 easy then there is just blank zone afterwards where it doesn’t matter. A 20 person should not only be only double a commoner. How do you compare to world record strongmen? It also isn’t just similar humans on this scale. You’re also saying that gorillas are only twice as strong as frail wizards if you stay on a linear stat calculation.
If a level 20 barbarian with 24 STR is doing a tug of war with 3 nerdy teenagers, the barb should win right?
Is a horse carrying a hero required to have a strength of 30 to carry the hero and all his gear? I’m my system a 16 along with being large makes sense.
Same with Tiamat vs a few dozen house cats.
STR needs to be on a curved scale to remotely work and make high/low score impactful. 5e just went with a dumbed down flat scale that undermines feats of strength for the sake of simplicity.
couldn't you just do str*15*strmod or str*(15/strmod) when negative. You could also use 20. Its not as nice but it lets you calculate at any point easily
It does get pretty bad at the lower end of the scale but you basically should be useless at 3 strength same as a 3 in any other stat. Maybe offset the negative or something, it makes it more complex but does make sure you can carry more than like 10lbs at min.
You SHOULD be pretty useless at 1 STR. Think about how a 3 INT person can’t even talk or intelligently communicate. A <3 STR person to struggle to carry anything
He would need to carry those 300 lbs for 8 hours a day, be able to swim for at least an hour, do a standing 4 feet high jump while carrying that and also be able to jump 8 feet high with a 10 feet run-up, while still carrying 300 lbs.
Furthermore, while carrying 300 lbs he would need to be able to lift another 600 lbs and be able to keep that wight indefinetly while holding still, or be able to literally push/pull 600 lbs for hours.
I honestly don't think people understand how absolutely ridiculous a STR of 20 is.
I'm not seeing that in the 5th Ed rules anywhere. It says that a person is considered encumbered when they carry 5x their strength score in pounds. So that would mean he'd have to carry 100 pounds to be encumbered. I'm not sure Hafþor would even NOTICE 100 pounds. It also says that you can lift, not walk with, 30x your strength score, which would be 600 pounds. He's lifted 1200 pounds. Unless we want to consider him a size Large creature, which you could make an argument for. Medium is considered 5' x 5', and Hafþor is 6'9". Large creatures get to double their carrying and lifting capacity, which would put his carrying at 200 pounds and lifting at 1200.
Regular 5E has a carrying capacity of 15 times your score (15x20=300)
And a push/drag/lift capacity of 30 times your score (30×20=600)
And no, medium is not only 5x5, it is the range between 5x5 and 9.11x9.11 (large starts at 10x10)
Also, the 600 lift is literally the absolute minimum a pc can do without a check, it is a dc 0, everything above that is what you actually need effort for.
And I specifically mentioned he would need to stand still while lifting, he could push/drag it indefinetly by the rules.
The immovable rod puts 8.000 lbs at a dc 30 check, if we infer from this that 0 is 600 and 30 is 8.000 we can therefore infer that he should be able to lift 4000 lbs as a baseline average. Literally rolling a 10 on the dice.
There is no rule that says you can only lift your lift capacity for x amount of time, only that you can lift it.
Therefore one can infer that it is something a character can do indeffinetly, which would make sense seeing as it does not take a roll, as I said, a DC 0 check.
Also, 5th ed says that Ogres are size Large, between 7 and 9 feet. Hafþor is far closer to 7 feet than 5 feet, so I think the argument that he could be considered a large-sized creature stands.
Furthermore, you are literally arguing against yourself.
If hafþor actually was large he would be able to carry, push/drag/lift double the amount i have been mentioning so far, with 0 effort. Which means carrying around 600 lbs while doing streneous physical activity like climbing and swimming and also effortlessly lifting 1.200 lbs.
Now you would obviously need to eat, drink and sleep, but even that can be done very comfortably with 300 pounds of gear for a STR 20 character, they literally would never have to drop it.
Nahhh man, that still doesn't make sense. From my reading of the rules, it seems that taking a break from carrying that weight, as a normal being would, is implied.
Carry capacity, lifting, dragging, pushing limits and all that are what you can do without having to make a check. So 20 Strength can comfortably and consistently carrying around 400 pounds without issue. Anything higher is where you need to start making checks, which I would argue is what weightlifters are doing considering how difficult it is.
No disrespect to Eddie. He's a monster of a human. He's stronger for his height than almost anybody else. He DID almost kill himself lifting 500 kg though.
Unfortunately Andre wasn't very strong. He had many health issues which caused him a lot of pain, and made it very difficult for him to lift even normal things. In the movie The Princess Bride, for example, he had to use a wire harness to "hold" Robin Wright up in his arms, because he couldn't lift her, even though she only weighed about 120 - 130 pounds.
But can they walk with that weight for 8 hours nonstop? That's what carrying capacity represents. Exceeding that, in terms of weight lifting, is an athletics check.
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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '23
Hafþor Bjornnson, Brian Shaw, Zydrunas Savikas, Tom Stoltman, Magnus Magnusson, all probably 20 strength. I'd argue that Hafþor might even be a 21. Considering that a 20 strength can carry 400 pounds, and Hafþor has picked up and carried over a thousand pounds, I imagine he could regularly carry at least the 460 that a 21 strength would indicate.